Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [248]
14. John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph, May 25, 2003. His review concluded: “President Bush may let slip the C-word in his press conferences, but what is at stake in the current conflict is something far more pervasive in its implications than the religious feuds that fed the binary hatreds of old.”
15. One of the first books printed by Ibrahim Müteferrika in Constantinople was entitled Rational Bases for the Polities of Nations (1731). It described the various forms of government practiced in Europe, and in particular the popular representation that underpinned the Dutch and English polities. Yet Müteferrika held the common view that the success of the Western nations lay in their military strength: it answered his question “Why do Christian nations, which were so weak in the past compared with Muslim nations, begin to dominate so many lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious Ottoman armies?” Cited in Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, New York: Routledge, 1998, pp. 42–3. The Ottomans engaged in what Dankwart Rustow neatly terms “defensive modernization”: see Rustow in P. M. Holt, Ann K. S. Lambton, and Bernard Lewis, The Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 1, Cambridge, 1970, pp. 676–86.
16. There existed a clear parallel in Western society. The religious transformation of Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was still perceived in two quite distinct ways three centuries later, depending entirely upon whether you were a Catholic or a Protestant. For a Protestant, winning the liberation of human souls from the antique shackles of a tyrannical, decrepit papacy was a war worth fighting. For a Catholic, the negative consequences of this sundering of Christendom far outweighed any benefits. This unbridgeable void continued through the nineteenth century, and on into the twentieth. The Catholic Church eventually evolved its own response to modernity and democracy. In sanctioning popular Catholic action (Christian democracy) Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum of 1891 (on the right and duties of labor and capital), declared: “It will be easy for Christian working men to solve it aright if they will form associations, choose wise guides, and follow on the path which with so much advantage to themselves and the common weal was trodden by their fathers before them.” In accommodating to modernity, the church assimilated what it needed, and then ignored the rest.
17. Professor Carol B. Stapp first drew my attention to the long persistence of non-Darwinian science teaching in Tennessee. “The Butler Act forbidding the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools was not repealed until 1967 … The issue was not long dormant, however. In 1973 the state legislature passed an ‘equal time’ law which legitimised the use of the bible as a scientific reference. The law was challenged in state and federal courts by civil liberties and teachers groups, and was overturned by the Federal Court of Appeals.” See “The History of Evolution in Tennessee,” http://fp.bio.utk.edu/darwin/essays/history.html (November 9, 2003). In the U.S. Supreme Court the case of Loving v. the State of Virginia of 1967 overturned the conviction of Richard and Mildred Loving under a 1922 Virginia statute that “if any white person intermarry with a colored person or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony.” The Lovings were sentenced to a year in prison, suspended provided they left the state. Thirty states had passed similar laws, and sixteen were still in force at the time of the Supreme Court decision.
18. David Kelley suggests how this sometimes persists into the twenty-first century in the United States. See “The Party of Modernity,” Cato Policy Report XXV, no. 3 (May-June 2003).
19. Conversely, those who did not turned to social resistance. The rural minority adopted anarchism in Andalucia, vagabondage and armed resistance in southern Italy. See T. Kaplan, Anarchists of Andalusia